{"id":1687,"date":"2019-12-29T12:25:03","date_gmt":"2019-12-29T12:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/russiable.com\/?p=1687"},"modified":"2024-01-06T12:07:16","modified_gmt":"2024-01-06T12:07:16","slug":"faberge-museum-st-petersburg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/russiable.com\/faberge-museum-st-petersburg\/","title":{"rendered":"The Faberg\u00e9 Museum in St. Petersburg: much more than Easter eggs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One museum that I recommend visiting is the Faberg\u00e9 Museum in St. Petersburg, a small, elegant museum that exhibits the favorite jewels of the czars, among which the famous Easter eggs are the most notable. It is located in downtown St. Petersburg in a beautiful, recently restored 18th century palace. In this article I\u2019ll tell you everything about this little gem of a museum.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Faberge<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

1. A Little Gem of a Museum<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A museum that I recommend visiting in St. Petersburg and that usually goes mostly unnoticed by tourists is the Faberg\u00e9 Museum<\/a>, perhaps because it is a fairly recent museum (it opened in 2013). The fact is that it is usually a pleasant surprise for all those who visit it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is located in the heart of St. Petersburg, on the Fontanka Canal, very close to Nevsky Avenue and you can tour it in just over 1 hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a private museum which houses some of the famous Faberg\u00e9 eggs, the most expensive Easter eggs in the world as well as some extraordinary items of Russian goldsmithing from the 19th and early 20th centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only does the Faberg\u00e9 Museum house eggs, but the museum tour includes more than 4,000 artistic works of different origins and also from centuries before the eggs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can buy tickets on the same day of the tour. It\u2019s not worth buying them online, since it\u2019s not a huge museum like the Hermitage<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article I\u2019ll tell you everything about Faberg\u00e9 eggs and about the visit to this small but elegant museum that I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. A bit about the history of Faberg\u00e9 eggs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Peter Carl Faberg\u00e9 (St. Petersburg, 1846 – Lausanne, Switzerland 1920) was Russia’s most famous and emblematic jeweler and the creator of the Faberg\u00e9 eggs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He started in a family workshop in St. Petersburg in 1870 and soon made his own name in goldsmithing. From 1885 he worked for the Russian imperial court of the Romanov, although he also worked for other European royalty.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Karl_Faberge\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The origin of Faberg\u00e9 eggs<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

At Easter in Russia there is a centuries-old tradition of coloring eggs by hand and taking them to church to be blessed and then giving them to friends or family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The highest strata of St. Petersburg society developed the custom of giving Easter gifts adorned with jewels. This is how Emperor Alexander III got the idea of commissioning the creation of a special Easter egg as a surprise for the Empress. And so the first imperial Easter egg was created in 1885.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This first egg was completely white on the outside, like the egg of a chicken, but inside it contained a golden yolk and this, in turn, opened to reveal a golden hen containing tiny jewels from the Imperial crown that unfortunately have been lost.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Chicken<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The Empress liked the gift so much that her husband decided to commission Faberg\u00e9 to make a new egg every year, on one condition only: that the egg would contain a surprise inside (yes, like Kinder eggs for today\u2019s children).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those eggs commemorated important events in the life and reign of the Romanov family. They were so complicated to make that manufacturing them could take 1 year with a team of highly qualified craftsmen who had to keep the contents of the eggs as the biggest secret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexander III gave his wife Empress Maria Feodorovna an egg each year. When Alexander III died the tradition was continued from 1895 by his son Nicholas II who presented an egg each year to both his wife, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, and his mother, Empress Dowager Maria Feodorovna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tradition of imperial eggs ended in 1917 with the Russian Revolution and the assassination of the entire Romanov family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks nationalized the House of Faberg\u00e9, and the Faberg\u00e9 family fled to Switzerland, where Peter Carl Faberg\u00e9 died in 1920. The palaces were looted and their treasures moved to the Kremlin Armory<\/a> under the orders of Vladimir Lenin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an attempt to earn more foreign exchange, Joseph Stalin sold many of the eggs in 1927. Beginning at the time of World War II, they began to be auctioned in different locations outside the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How many Faberg\u00e9 eggs were made and where are they currently?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There is a catalog of 69 eggs, created between 1885 and 1917 (the year of the Russian Revolution), 8 of which are missing. Of the 69 eggs, 52 were commissioned by the imperial family, which is why they\u2019re called imperial eggs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently, there are 10 imperial eggs in the Kremlin Armory<\/a> and 9 in the Faberg\u00e9 Museum in St. Petersburg. 5 eggs are in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts<\/a> (United States). Incidentally, the Queen of England owns three of the imperial eggs. The rest are scattered in various museums and private collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the twentieth century the price of Faberg\u00e9 eggs began to rise astronomically. Some of the Faberg\u00e9 eggs could be valued at 30 million euros a piece in today\u2019s currency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years ago one of these missing eggs turned up in the United States. A scrap dealer bought the egg at a flea market in a town in the American Midwest for $13,300, with the intention of getting good money by smelting the metal. Nobody bought the piece from him, thinking it was overvalued and the scrap dealer left the piece in his home for years, while thinking about what to do with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day in 2012, he googled \u201cegg\u201d and \u201cVacheron Constantin\u201d the name of the clock inside, and he ended up discovering that he had a masterpiece valued at 20 million pounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. The Faberg\u00e9 Museum<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The privately owned Faberg\u00e9 Museum was officially opened in the Shuvalov Palace on November 19, 2013 by the Link of Times Foundation<\/a>, a cultural and historical organization created by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Malcolm Forbes, the billionaire and editor of Forbes<\/em> magazine, managed to accumulate the largest collection of Faberg\u00e9 eggs throughout his life (1919-1990): 9 eggs, and approximately 180 other Faberg\u00e9 objects. His heirs were about to auction the collection in February 2004. However, before the auction began, the entire collection was purchased by Viktor Vekselberg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a 2013 BBC documentary, Vekselberg revealed that he had spent just over $100 million to buy the nine Faberg\u00e9 eggs. He claims that he had never exhibited them at home, saying that he acquired them for their importance to Russian history and culture, and because he believes they are the best jewelry art in the world<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, he acquired Faberg\u00e9 jewels from other owners and tracked pieces across Europe, Asia and America. In total, he bought more than 4,000 quality items, from the Faberg\u00e9 House or other collections which belonged, originally and very often, to European royal courts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Shuvalov Palace, Headquarters of the Museum<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The Faberg\u00e9 Museum is located in the Shuvalov Palace, at a very central location (Fontana River Embankment, 21). It is located next to the most famous thoroughfare in St. Petersburg, Nevsky Avenue, very close to the Anichkov Bridge and on the bank of the Fontanka River (or rather Canal), across from the Russian National Library, which is the country\u2019s second largest after the State Library in Moscow.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Shuvalov<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The nearest Metro station is Gostiny Dvor. Walking from there you will get to Nevsky Avenue in about 10 minutes. Other nearby Metro stations are Mayakovskaya or Ploshchad Vosstaniya, about 15 minutes on foot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are also buses (7, 24, 27 and 128) or the trolleybus, along Nevsky Avenue, which will take you to the museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n